Raph's Website » More roundup, due to illness

More roundup, due to illness

May 4th, 2007 (Visited 2001 times) Tags:

Allergies knocked me down yesterday (well, technically, it was the Benadryl that knocked me down). So here’s another roundup, and perhaps someday we’ll return to the days of overly lengthy articl;es stuffed full of colorful and insightful commentary.

Toby Ragaini, of Asheron’s Call fame, is back with a casual MMO startup called Thinglefin.
Runescape has 1 million paying subs now, and Gamasutra has an interview.
Kart Rider, probably the most popular Korean game ever, is launching in the U.S. The question for me is, how many American kids have already played it? I am guessing the answer is “a lot.” After all, XFire stats show…
Actually, let’s do a whole line item for XFire stats. Take a look at those top ten MMOs by hours played. Look odd to you?

Here’s April’s stats:

World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
Silkroad Online
MapleStory
Eve Online
Flyff
Lineage II
Star Wars Galaxies
Rappelz
Kal Online

If you’re saying “what the hell are Rappelz and Kal Online” you wouldn’t be alone. Note that titles like Vanguard and the EQ’s are even on the list (LOTRO won’t show up until next month). XFire reaches a decent cross-section of gamers — there’s over 200,000 of them on right now as I write this, and it’s not quite 10:30am Pacific time on a weekday — so this probably statistically significant. The question is how international their audience is, I suppose.

But as I have said before, I think a lot more American and European kids are playing Korean games than we tend to think.

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moo said on May 4th, 2007 at 10:37 am:

Not everyone uses XFire. I think you’ll find its mostly teenage kids (high-schoolers) and some university kids using it. Maybe it reflects the appeal of WoW to younger age-groups, and the (lack of) appeal of other MMOs to those kids.

At least EVE is high on the list. I wonder what the correlation between social/political in-game stuff and XFire users is?

Dave Rickey said on May 4th, 2007 at 10:38 am:

The fact that SWG and Eve-Online are on the list, and a lot of games we know are equally large or larger aren’t says more about the uptake of XFire in various game populations than about the relative popularity of the games. Don’t get me wrong, I love Eve, but I really doubt that it is beating out EQ1 in population. It’s at 170K subscribers and PCU of 38K, last I checked.

Of course, it’s also tilted in favor of length of playing session, and Eve would get inflated by people turning on the autopilot for a 30-jump trip.

–Dave

Calvin said on May 4th, 2007 at 10:45 am:

I don’t know when it was launched, but I checked out Rappelz this month by coincidence. It’s a very good looking high-polish game, on par with Silk Road Online. If the combination of high-polish + free-to-play is what drove Silk Road up the charts, I fully expect Rappelz to climb too.

I tried out Kal Online too, and the only reason I can think that people are still playing that game is because they couldn’t log onto Silk Road because the servers were full. It’s looks and feels like a student project and has basically the same setting (mythological Korea vs. China) as Silk Road.

What I found really interesting about the top 10 MMO list is that only 3 of the games on there are from the major MMO publishers (SOE and NCSoft). The rest (except WoW) are from these small boutique publishers who offer diverse free-to-play games.

Also, I would say WoW is the only game on there that is “high fantasy” (as in Tolkien inspired Orc vs. Elves).

Trucegore said on May 4th, 2007 at 10:55 am:

I recognize allot of those games, i also recognize allot of them being “Free to play” Item shop games.

Also, this of course is only a list of xfire users… and on top of that, the ones that turn on there xfire. I play planetside ALLOT but xfire bombs when you run it..so all my hours are lost.

Anyway… I do see the trend your pointing out even with in those known limitations.

I’m am not surprised however, that “Free to play” games are high on that list, there are many factors that make F2P game more active, its free, no age limit (even if only imposed by CC requirements), parents of children don’t need to be involved to sign up, its free. lol.

I think its apples and oranges however, you cant really compare F2P with P2P games, as far as “Number of players” are involved.

Also consider the play style of those free games….

Trucegore said on May 4th, 2007 at 11:00 am:

Also, total side note.

The F2P games have another thing going for them with young users.

If you have the money, you can be more powerful/adorned than others users, for lunch money prices.

Matt Mihaly said on May 4th, 2007 at 11:25 am:

This can’t be that statistically significant if Runescape isn’t on there at #1 or #2.

–matt

Raph said on May 4th, 2007 at 11:29 am:

Lots of games are not tracked by XFire at all. I would guess Runescape is one of these.

So no, the list is not at all pretending to be authoritative for all MMOs. But it’s definitely interesting to compare for among the group of MMOs that DO work with XFire.

Good point on Planetside, Trucegore… it may be that the EQs don’t actually work correctly with Xfire as well.

Trucegore said on May 4th, 2007 at 1:07 pm:

BTW, Planetside needs some love man… What a great game, just wasting away (lack of DEV publisher support).

Did you do anything for it while you were over there you can talk about?

Calvin said on May 4th, 2007 at 1:09 pm:

The way I understand it, xfire tracks executables and since Runescape runs in a browser it can’t be tracked. EQ2 was tracked (I don’t know how accurately), but dropped out of the top 10 in 3/06.

When I look at this data I don’t think of it as relating to subscriber numbers, I consider it an indication of game stickiness.

EQ2 may have a larger subscriber base than most of these games; but if those users are rarely playing the game, and just maintain the account because of fond memories, they’re not evangelizing the game to their friends and growing the subscriber base.

If you look at Silk Road’s hours per day over the last year:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pHXj22oP1nTGj1xu4YQGVMg
You can see that people are coming back for more and bringing their friends with them.

Trucegore may discount these games because they’re free, but I’ve played all the free-to-play games on this chart and (with the exception of Kal Online) they are fun, quality games that compare favorably to retail/subscription games. They’re not just climbing this chart because of cheap/young gamers.

Raph said on May 4th, 2007 at 1:13 pm:

Nice, Calvin. Blogged it. Any chance you can add in the games that fell off the chart?

Tess said on May 4th, 2007 at 4:38 pm:

I imagine that most of the Rappelz players out there are teenagers. It’s free, and honestly, anybody who could afford anything better wouldn’t be playing this for more than a week.

I don’t like badmouthing other peoples’ games, but I tried it out for a couple of days, a few months ago, and it was just shockingly bad. As far as I can tell, it was built by a team of drunk monkeys, on the bones of the stolen Lineage II source, and then localized by a guy who hasn’t taken an English class since high school. Parts of the interface are so broken, I’d be embarrassed to show them in an early internal demo. The game mechanics have blind alleys so bad that you may find yourself having to re-roll a few times. (I had this same problem with the Earth and Beyond beta.)

Also, you get tired of killing chickens after a few hours. Dear God. Make it stop!

JoeW said on May 7th, 2007 at 5:01 pm:

The question for me is, how many American kids have already played it? I am guessing the answer is “a lot.”

Thats pretty much it in a nutshell.

Trucegore said on May 9th, 2007 at 10:49 am:

I don’t discount them, i just do not compare them. They are a totally diffrent game play, and mindset.

I also do not find them fun. I find them (Warning opinion) repetitive, shallow (Content wise), and uninspired, and lacking in many social game play elements i prefer, mostly due to a young community membership. I’m sure there are exception, but i have not played all of them.

They ARE geared to younger players, from the reading level involved, to the game play, and the reward mechanics.

Most items shops use one mechanic. The same one that in middle school, the cool kids had the expensive shoes. Its the same motivation.

The onion is a free publication, yet no one compares it to the NYT.

Trucegore said on May 9th, 2007 at 10:58 am:

To add, don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with that design, they excel at what they do, but in terms of accessibility, the first gate is subscription or no subscription. Also, ignoring that the target audience is young people and all that comes with that (such as MUCH more free time than adults) is kinda wrong IMO.

Now, if we could get numbers on Age brackets of “Subscribers” it would tell a different story.

Starcraft had no subscription, shall we also compare number of users/hours? (also can be tracked by Xfire)

Respectfully
Truce.

Trucegore said on May 9th, 2007 at 11:04 am:

Need and Edit button:

Also, its worthy to note where, and how the F2P games are advertised. Look where the ads are.